Berlin, A City In Renaissance

It Is Emerging As Focal Point For East Meeting West

February 14, 1999|By Jeffrey Bils. Jeffrey Bils is a Tribune staff writer who recently completed a journalism fellowship in Germany.

In 1987, I asked an East German friend if, given the chance, he would sneak across the border with his wife and children to make a new life in the West. He said no.

This was back when Communist Party leader Erich Honecker was still firmly in power, and when a wall still divided a city known in the east as Berlin, Capital of the German Democratic Republic.

But my friend didn't think of East Germany as some kind of evil police state. He thought of it as home.

His friends were there. His family was there. His career as a Lutheran pastor was there. He acknowledged that the country had faults; he wanted to reform it from within. Besides, he said, the capitalist West had problems of its own. No, he wouldn't leave.

A few years later, his sentiments became moot. The wall was dismantled. The two Germanys reunited. East Germans didn't have to think about escaping to the West. The West came to them.

This year, as Berlin prepares to renew its role as the capital of a united Germany, the city is jarringly different than it was a decade ago.

Back then, the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin's famous triumphal arch, was a hemmed-off gateway to nowhere, isolated from the West by the wall. One could only wonder what it would be like to move freely through its columns and down along Unter den Linden. Today, that boulevard has become a busy thoroughfare. Visitors can ride under the arch for the price of a ticket on a public bus.

Back then, the city was spooky. The wall was built a few feet into East Berlin, so that Westerners who approached it, who touched it or who sprayed it with graffiti, technically were trespassing on foreign land.

Next to Checkpoint Charlie, a museum chronicled the ingenious and sometimes deadly attempts of East Berliners to sneak out. Even for Westerners with permission, it was difficult to cross the border without a sense of unease, or to walk the gray streets of East Berlin without looking over one's shoulder.

Today, the small museum still stands near the place where Checkpoint Charlie used to be, but the border guards, the barriers, the dogs and the guns have disappeared. The crossing has become a busy street. Commuters routinely drive the same route people once risked their lives to travel.

It's impossible to tell where the wall used to be. Lingering vestiges of the old division are disappearing. In 1992, a friend from West Berlin told me that he and many others still drove out of their way to get from place to place, out of habit, as if the wall were still in place. More recently, another friend reported that almost nobody does this any more.

Social and ideological differences will take longer to disappear. During the national election in September, voters in former East Berlin supported the communist party, known as the Party of Democratic Socialism, in far greater numbers than did voters in former West Berlin. With support in the east, several PDS candidates from Berlin were elected to parliament.

Former East Berlin also is home to a greater percentage of voters who cast ballots for far-right parties. In some parts of East Berlin, there are rows of buildings that look much the same as they did during communism, buildings that once may have been ornate and even elegant, but have long since become dusty, drab and ill-maintained. Some of these neighborhoods are a little like Chicago's Wicker Park--gathering places for artists and activists who oppose gentrification with all the futility of someone 20 years ago trying to escape. They don't want their distinctive neighborhoods to become just another anonymous place, but there might not be much they can do about it.

In most parts of Berlin, the stutter of jackhammers fills the air. Ever since parliament voted to move the federal government from Bonn to Berlin, developers have been scrambling to cash in.

More than 3,000 cranes tower over Berlin. Utility tubes and wires supported on wooden beams run up and down the city's streets, like a scene out of the movie "Brazil." The city has become the largest construction zone in Europe.

Civic leaders view Berlin as the natural crossroads of a new, emerging European community. Throughout the Cold War, Berlin was stuck beyond the edge of the West. It was an island isolated behind the Iron Curtain. Today, all that has changed.

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic are joining NATO. Trade and travel between eastern and western Europe is vastly freer than it has been for decades.

Volker Hassemer, managing director of Berlin Partner, recently summed up these sentiments for a group of American journalists. Said Hassemer: "The news coming from Europe for the next 20 years will come from this part of Europe. . . . To come together between Eastern and Western Europe is a very important topic at this time."

Tens of thousands of Polish and Russian business people have been attracted to Berlin, where contacts in former Eastern Bloc nations never were abandoned.

Along the route from Moscow to Paris, Berlin is the most important stop.

All this is nothing new. Until 1945, Berlin's Potsdamer Platz was the busiest intersection in Europe. For decades after the war, it was barren. The wall ran right through it. Today, it's the biggest construction site in Berlin.

The changes in this city during the past decade have been stunning. On my most recent visit, I spent an entire day going back to places I had been in the late 1980s, just to experience the overwhelming contrast.

Yet Berlin remains a work in progress. It's hard to envision what it will look like when the cranes finally come down. It's impossible to know whether Berlin can fulfill its promise to become Europe's most important city. I wonder what I'll see a decade from now.